small change

indorare la pillola

I’ve gone back to studying Italian. For the last couple of years I have been struggling with learning Spanish. To my dismay, very little of the language would stick to me, this in spite of living in an area with a huge Hispanic population. The more verb and vocabulary drills I would perform, the less I would be able to use what I learned in actual conversation. What would issue forth in my attempts at exchanges in Spanish would be colored by an odd Italian tinge in grammar and accent.

A few weeks ago I woke up thinking in Italian. As if a dam had burst, the words kept pouring forth. Along with them an illumination: for me, learning certain languages have been more like remembering something I forgot. Italian clearly fits in this category. French and English were like that. Others, like German and Spanish, wouldn’t cohere in my mind and the words would stick to my tongue, but that would be the extent of it. A mouthful of gritty stuff I could neither spit out nor swallow. 

I don’t travel well. That is, the thought of setting out for trans-Atlantic flights (or even trans-continental ones) then exploring foreign cities doesn’t fill me with anticipation or excitement, only with an amorphous dread, most of the time. It’s no wonder then that I found a way to get around, if not with my body, at least in my head, through words, or in the idea of different worlds. Other languages have been more than, well, more words to me; they have been gateways to seeing the world anew.

In this last while, when unexpected pressures have made my days somewhat unpredictable and mostly dependent on others, small chunks of Italian provide a space, if not exactly a place, in which my troubles have to stay outside the limits of articulation.

Italian as treatment for the reduction of anxiety – what an unpharmaceutic solution, but what great side effects, no? Alice Flaherty, the neurologist who wrote The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, observed that most brain damage that causes language problems also causes changes in mood, which makes of language a “mood-altering” substance, when you think about it:

“The psychologist Dylan Evans has argued that language was the first mood-altering substance. It can improve mood in several different ways: by consoling, by entertaining, and by venting. The first two ways benefit the hearer, the third, the speaker. Language can also worsen mod, of course as in verbal abuse or the assertion of social dominance, or simply through boredom.

Consoling, although generally a service provided by one person to another, can also be done for oneself, as when we whisper silent words of encouragement when we feel low. Cognitive behavioral therapy attempts to create just such an internal monologue and it can be as effective as antidepressants in treating moderate depression.”

Well then, consolation in Italian, at least for me, is like sugarcoating the pill, as well as giving the world a brighter, more golden hue.

rain

Rain has returned this afternoon. It's a gentle rain that can barely hold on to the clouds growing weary of carrying it across a sky still beholden to the autumn sun. But the mood has changed, and if I am pressed to name it, I would call it melancholy. Maybe because I always liked that word. Its sound conjures up northern latitudes in my mind, landscapes lit up against the slant of long shadows, the air cool and spiked with just a hint of the smoke of old passions still lingering.  Be that as it may, a quick online search turns up quite another definition of melancholy in this entry in wikipedia:

In a modern context, "melancholy" applies only to the mental or emotional symptoms of depression or despondency; historically, "melancholia" could be physical as well as mental, and melancholic conditions were classified as such by their common cause rather than by their properties.

I am not sure how the world turned from one in which causes were lived, like trees with roots and crowns that spanned the hidden recesses of ground and the airless heights of sky into a world as a constellation of symptoms to be relieved through the appropriate choice of meds.

axonism

Some years (well many years) ago I tried to write novels. Me and other millions. I believed I had creative juices fermenting in my soul, distilling language into deeply evocative images and narratives about the world of which I was a part and which was mine. In retrospect, what with all that science has brought us in a sudden exponential explosion of explanation for all things, it seems that the juices were nothing more than ebbs or spikes in brain hormones. All of which can be regulated into “normalcy” much more easily than can the flow of words into the shape of art... Which brings me to Marco Roth's essay on The Rise of the Neuronovel, and excellent read for writers and readers alike, in n+1 (via Mind Hacks).

A growing number of novelists such as Ian McEwan (never cared much for his work), Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, among others, have embraced this genre of making of the brain the heart and soul of humanity. But, according to Roth, rater than illuminate the human condition, these novels tend to show the desperation of “the novelist's fear of his isolation and meaninglessness, and the alleged capacity of science to explain him better than he can explain himself.”

As for the reader of the neuronovel, according to Roth, he fares no better:

The aesthetic sensation a reader gets from the neuronovel is not the pleasure of finding the general in the particular, but a frustration born of the defeat of the metaphoric impulse. We want to make the metaphor work, to say, “Yes, we are all a bit like a paranoid schizophrenic sometimes” or, “Yes, as Mark Haddon’s autistic narrator needs to separate the foods on his plate and not let them touch, to sort colors into good and bad, so am I in my impulse to classify a new genre.” But this would be to indulge the worst tendency of literary criticism, whether of a jargony and sectarian or burbling and humanistic type: to insist on meaning or relevance when there isn’t any, or when the works themselves actually foreclose it. Instead the reader has to admit to himself that his brain doesn’t work like an autistic person’s, a Capgras sufferer’s, and that when he loves or works or fears or talks, his ordinary neurons fire or misfire for ordinary rather than extraordinary reasons, whatever these may be.

In other words, the neuronovel in its present form presents the experience of a cognitive defeat.

Descartes is dead. Long live Darwin!

Derrida is dead. Long live the dendrite!

Minding efficiency

Over at Mind Hacks there is a link to an article about the fledgling – and potentially financially rewarding – field of "neurtechnology." Interestingly enough, the article starts with a reference to a conversation with a former research scientist for big tobacco. Seems that nicotine, that much aligned villain of addictions, is under new management is getting ready to audition for the role of hero, or savior of damaged memories, scattered attention spans, and nasty pains.

In addition to rushing both the development of drugs and implants to help cure the burgeoning crop of mental illnesses popping up across the world, scientists in this field are exploring the development of drugs used to enhance the mind in general.

A larger debate is percolating over what would happen if a pill could turn most people into brainiacs. "I don't believe in cognitive enhancement for people who are well," says memory expert and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, a professor at Columbia University. "These should be pharma products for sick people." N.I.H. neuroscientist Jordan Grafman agrees: "If you manipulate the brain, it can change who we are."

Others say enhancers can't be stopped. "The record is clear. Wherever there have been new agents that enhance our functioning, mental or physical, even when they're risky like steroids, there are people who will use them," says U.C.L.A. bioethicist Gregory Stock, author of Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future and a strident advocate for enhancement. "Why shouldn't people use them if they don't hurt us?"

That question quoted in the article sounds more at home in the mouth of an economist than that of a bioethicist, one would think. Unless, in the last few years, the field of bioethics has itself become one of the economies of impairment versus improvement measured on a personal scale. Not such a strange notion, mind you, since that is exactly what I am trying to do with my practice of yoga: improve my body and mind. Would I choose to take a pill to bypass the work and time incurred by my practice in order to derive the benefits? Hmm, I don't think so.

Pumping up the mind on attention enhancing drugs is in direct opposition to what I have been trying to explore in my series of comments on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which advocate the settling of the mind in order to come to both know and understand how the mind works. Of course, the aim of both this research and yoga is to know the mind. Science has made huge strides in identifying areas of the brain involved in different mental activities. And yet, it has nothing to say about the experience of consciousness that wraps that mental activity. There is something in the experience of the work and time I put into my yoga practice that I am not sure nicotinic drugs can deliver to my neurotransmitters. At least not yet….